The White House on Thursday (April 17) suggested that during a meeting between President Barack Obama and insurance commissioners it put pressure on state insurance regulators to limit exchange plan premium increases for 2015, shortly before the president announced that 8 million people signed up for qualified health plans on the exchanges during 2014 open enrollment and the just-ended special enrollment period.

North Dakota Insurance Commissioner Adam Hamm — following the meeting with the president, vice president, senior administration officials and other insurance regulators — said insurance commissioners take their rate review responsibility very seriously and will only approve rates that are actuarially justified. But he cautioned that while it is key for rates to be at a level that consumers can pay, rates “cannot be divorced” from the solvency of insurance companies.

I know it’s a little premature but I wanted to wish everyone a Happy Easter, at least those of you who do some sort of celebration. We’re having a busy one this year!

Our son accepted a job in CO and so he is moving the family before May 15th. He’ll only be about an hour away from our daughter in Golden so she’s really looking forward to having family around again. Anyway, I’m picking the kids up from their great grandmother’s house tomorrow about noon and they’re coming here to color eggs, have hamburgers and spend the night. We’ll have the traditional Easter egg hunt in the morning since our grandson is only 8 and then deliver them around noon to their other grandparent’s house for an early Easter dinner.

My son and his wife are packing, cleaning and getting rid of shit this weekend. 😉

I’m really sad to see our grandkids move so far away but I guess I’ll be racking up the frequent flyer miles.

Anyway, if you’re seeing family this weekend…..please enjoy it…..you never know when things might change.

Thanks to jnc I’ve gotten onto a Roman history kick this last year or so, and right now I’m reading Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome series. It is both hilarious and frightening how similar the politics sound!

And while we can laugh away the cow-eyed vacancy of Mr. Weinstein, the desire to criminalize political disagreement extends well beyond his orbit. It was revealed this week that Lois Lerner and her squadron of flying monkeys at the IRS not only targeted conservative groups for harassment and suppression but that the IRS and the woefully misnamed Justice Department were trying to trump up criminal prosecutions against those groups as well, i.e. finding a pretext to literally imprison people as a response to their political activism.

BTW…went to see Billy Joel at Madison Square Garden last night. He still does a great show. And he is basically in residence at MSG, doing a show a month indefinitely, as long as he can keep selling the place out. So I’m guessing “indefinitely” will end up meaning “until he drops dead”. If you find yourself in NYC, I highly recommend it.

My biggest regret with her work is that she didn’t start a generation earlier with the Gracci, which I consider to be probably one of the most dramatic stories in Roman history.

On that I’d have to agree. She does a great job of creating a storyline that’s close enough to actual history to be useful while novelizing it enough to hold your interest through all of the different iterations of Quintus Caecilius Metellus and Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus.

I’m almost ready to tackle The Gracchi now.

Adding yours to the list, McWing!

EDIT: Plus, in Coleen McCullough’s books you learn some Latin obscenities/vulgarisms. Always fun to be able to call people obscene names in Latin!

Lol, one year we saved them for a year and ate them the following Easter. Hard and yummy! I feel sort of sick right now. Getting ready for round two of Easter. Cooking dinner for our oldest daughter, boyfriend and his mother, who is a very interesting person ;).

A good example of the way media outlets like the NYT adopt and promote D talking points in what is an ostensibly objective news article.

Many of those helped by the health care law — notably young people and minorities — are the least likely to cast votes that could preserve it, even though millions have gained health insurance and millions more will benefit from some of its popular provisions.

In fact it is young people who notably harmed, not helped, by the law, given that they are the ones having to pay higher premiums than their risk profile suggests they should, in order to subsidize older and sicker people who pay less than their risk profile would call for. And whether or not “millions” have benefited or will benefit from the law is a wholly subjective point of view, not a fact as presented in the article.

It’s hard to believe that there are some people who still view the NYT as a respectable and objective source of political news. They barely even keep up even the pretense of objectivity any more.

Troll, you were at PL long enough to know: there is no Left in America.

Those NYT liberals are flummoxed by the apparent failure this time around of their usual strategy of enacting big, destructive programs of redistribution and trusting that the recipients of tangible benefits will be more conscious and more protective of their largesse than all those paying for it will be conscious of the fact that they are being screwed. How tragic. When the envy machine breaks down, preventing the noble Democrats from buying votes with other people’s money, it really shows how dysfunctional our politics have come, doesn’t it?

That implies there was functionality, I posit that since at least the imposition of the income tax that concept of what constitutes functionality of government changed. Prior to that it was severely hamstrung by financing. After, it’s constraint was undone and it’s rise inevitable.